theShaunus

I will literally retweet anything.

[WW2 The Eastern Front @ShoahUkraine]

Part 4:

It was at Stalingrad, in a city pounded into gravel and ash, where soldiers fought floor by floor and room by room and stair by stair for the bones of a single building, that the legend of German invincibility finally bled out into the rubble and died. It was the Red Army, not the beaches in the west, that broke the back of the vast bulk of Hitler's divisions and ground them into the eastern dirt.

And it was not only the soldier. It was the mother who buried three sons and put the fourth on the train to the front without a word of complaint. It was the factory worker, a woman, who tore her entire machine shop up by the roots and dragged it a thousand miles east ahead of the enemy and bolted it back together under the open sky and built tanks through a Siberian winter with cracked and bleeding hands. It was an entire people who poured themselves whole into the furnace and paid, in full, the price that bought the freedom the West so loves to stand up and say it delivered.

They knew precisely what they were facing, because the enemy had been honest about it in writing. They were not fighting for a border, or for an ideology in the ordinary sense of those words. They were fighting because the alternative had been printed in black and white in plans they could read, and the alternative was that they, and their children, and their children's children, would simply not be permitted to exist on the earth. There is no Clausewitz for that. There is no treaty, no truce, no clever diplomacy with a policy whose single goal is your erasure from the soil. You win, or you and everyone you have ever loved is shoveled into a pit. So they won. At a cost no nation in the West has ever once been asked to pay, or could survive paying, or can in its heart truly imagine.

So when you call that war to mind, I am not asking you to lay down the memory of your own dead. Carry them. Honor them always. I am asking you to pull the frame back, and back, and back again, until the whole monstrous truth of it finally fits inside the picture. The Eastern Front was not merely the ugly far edge of ordinary warfare. It was the deliberate murder of warfare's last surviving rule, the single rule that whispers the man across from you is still a man. Tear that one rule out by the root, and what is left behind is not battle at all. It is extermination.

Planned, scheduled, signed for, photographed, and carried out to the last burning village, and it was carried out against a people who answered it with a sacrifice so total, so far past anything you have ever been asked to give, that every one of us, you in your safety most of all, is alive and free right now only inside the peace that their twenty seven million dead reached up out of the ground and bought for us.
So do not you dare let them be a footnote. They did not earn a footnote. They earned the whole book, and the silence you keep after you close it.

[theShaunus @theShaunus]

@alchemist2114 @ShoahUkraine @simonwebb54

[Dear Self. @Dearme2_]

Real Luxuries in Life

1. Living 10 minutes from work
2. Living 5 minutes from the gym
3. Having quiet neighbors
4. Having money left at the end of the month and investing it
5. Peace at home
6. Drinking coffee without rushing
7. Sleeping with a clear conscience
8. Laughing with people who truly get you
9. Traveling often for vacations
10. Waking up naturally without an alarm
11. Enjoying a home-cooked meal with loved ones
12. Having time to read a book in one sitting
13. Finding joy in simple daily routines
14. Having a pet that greets you happily at the door

These are the things that actually feel rich.

[𐙚⋆ @voidwithverses]

“𝘈 𝘥𝘳𝘶𝘯𝘬 𝘮𝘢𝘯'𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘢 𝘴𝘰𝘣𝘦𝘳 𝘮𝘢𝘯'𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴.”

— 𝘐𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘴

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Indian Family Vandalied Vietnam Restaurant After Dispute Over Children's Misbehaviour.

The family, identified as being from Delhi, has deleted their social media profiles. The incident has sparked widespread backlash on social media regarding tourist etiquette and civic sense, with the matter reported to local police. 

The vandals have not been officially named by authorities or the restaurant.  However, social media users and some reports have identified the man in the CCTV footage as Sumit Sehgal.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

the worst german general of ww2 wasnt the one who lost the most battles. it was Ferdinand Schörner. and the reason is way darker and more interesting than incompetence.

Schörner was actually brave in WW1. won the Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest medal, storming an Italian mountain at Caporetto in 1917. so this isnt a story about a coward. its worse than that.

by WW2 he had become Hitler's favorite kind of general. not the smartest, not the most talented. the most ruthless. his whole command philosophy was one phrase: strength through fear. and he didnt mean the enemy's fear. he meant his own men.

he roamed the front lines personally, behind his OWN army, hunting for soldiers who had drifted from their units. stragglers. wounded men looking for an aid station. boys who got separated in a retreat. he had them hanged on the spot.

he left the bodies hanging from trees and lampposts with signs around their necks. "I am a deserter." "Here hangs a coward." the idea was that the next exhausted soldier walking by would be too terrified to ever step backward. his own troops feared him more than they feared the Soviet army, and the Soviet army was not gentle.

officers who served with him couldnt stand him. one famously called him a man who spread terror among his own ranks. he relieved competent commanders, ignored reality, screamed about willpower while divisions got encircled, and reported fake optimism straight up to Hitler. which is exactly why Hitler loved him.

on April 5th 1945, with the entire war collapsing, Hitler promoted him to Generalfeldmarschall. field marshal. the highest rank in the German army. he was the LAST person ever promoted to it in the Third Reich. think about that. the regime was dying and the final field marshal's baton went to a man whose main skill was executing teenagers.

it gets better. in Hitler's actual last will, written days before he killed himself, he named Schörner the new commander in chief of the entire German army. a promotion to lead an army that had days left to exist.

now here is the part that makes people lose their minds.

Schörner commanded Army Group Center in what is now the Czech Republic. close to a million men. the war ends. and the man who hanged exhausted boys for retreating one single step... takes off his field marshal uniform. puts on a Bavarian folk costume. lederhosen basically. and climbs into a small plane.

he flies away. he abandons his entire army group. hundreds of thousands of men he had personally terrorized are left standing in the open to be marched into Soviet captivity, where huge numbers of them would die. and their commander is gone. disguised as a civilian. saving the one life he actually cared about.

he surrendered to the Americans in comfort. clean, alive, free.

the universe did claw a little back. the Americans handed him to the Soviets. they gave him 25 years. he served about ten and got released in 1955. then West Germany wasnt finished. they put him on trial too and convicted him of manslaughter for the killings of his own soldiers. one of the very few German generals his own country actually punished.

but he still beat the system in the end. he got out, moved to Munich, and died an old free man in 1973. the last surviving German field marshal of the war. outlived nearly everyone he sent to die.

so when people argue about the worst German general, they usually picture someone who fumbled a battle. Schörner wasnt bad at war. he was something uglier. a man who turned all his cruelty inward on his own soldiers, then ran the moment it could no longer buy him anything.

worst general of the war. not even close.

[News Algebra @NewsAlgebraIND]

Punjab and Uttarakhand Elections in November as per Hindustan Times 🤯

[News Algebra @NewsAlgebraIND]

A hotel employee in Tirupati returned gold jewellery worth ₹40 lakh after a guest accidentally left it in a room.

SP honoured staff member Shashi and appreciated his honesty 🫡

Jewellery Owner Bharath -

"I accidentally left the jewellery bag at the hotel. After reaching Bengaluru, I realised it was missing and informed the police"

"Shashi had kept the bag safe. I am very thankful to Shashi"

[WW2 The Eastern Front @ShoahUkraine]

I get comments every day about how the Germans had it rough in WW2, etc., and I'll just say that I do not care. Germans were deported from Silesia and Pomerania. I do not care what happened in Dresden. I do not care what happened to the women of Berlin, even if true, which it is not.

After the siege of Leningrad, with one million people starving to death, after Treblinka and Sobibor, after Aktion T4, the fact that any of you are still alive means we were too merciful.

I say this within the WW2 context and not about Germans of today, who are for the most part decent people, but in 1945, yes, all of you deserved it unless proven otherwise.

[Sann @san_x_m]

Her name is Ambika.

She grew up in a village in Tamil Nadu.

She was married when she was only fourteen years old to a man who worked as a police constable.

By the age of eighteen, she was the mother of two daughters, and her own education had ended long before.

One day, she accompanied her husband to a Republic Day parade.

She watched him salute a row of senior officers and asked him who they were.

He told her they were IPS officers, and that reaching that rank required clearing the Civil Services Examination, one of the toughest exams in the country.

That moment changed her life.

She told her husband that one day she wanted to become one of those officers.

The dream seemed impossible.

She had not even completed school.

So she began again from the beginning.

She finished Class 10, then Class 12, and later earned a college degree.

She moved to Chennai to prepare for the Civil Services Examination, while her husband stayed behind and looked after their two daughters.

Success did not come quickly.

She failed once.

Then she failed again.

Then a third time.

Her husband gently suggested that she return home.

She asked him for one last chance.

In 2008, on her fourth attempt, Ambika cleared the Civil Services Examination and became an IPS officer.

The girl who had been married at fourteen grew up to wear the same uniform her husband had once stood and saluted.

Follow for stories India deserves to remember.

[Sann @san_x_m]

His name was G. D. Naidu.

He was born in 1893 in a small village near Coimbatore, into a farming family.

He hated school, left after the third standard, and never returned to formal education.

As a teenager, he saw a British officer riding a motorcycle and could not believe a vehicle could move without an animal pulling it.

Determined to own one, he left his village, worked for nearly three years as a waiter in a hotel, and saved every coin until he could buy a motorcycle.

Then he did something unusual.

He took the entire machine apart, piece by piece, simply to understand how it worked.

By putting it back together again, he taught himself to be a mechanic.

That curiosity changed his life.

He began with a single bus that he drove himself and eventually built one of the finest bus services in the country.

In 1937, at his workshop in Coimbatore, he built India’s first indigenous electric motor.

That invention played a major role in transforming Coimbatore into one of India’s leading industrial cities.

He did not stop there.

Over his lifetime, he developed more than a hundred inventions, including an electric razor that won international recognition, ultra thin shaving blades, a tamper proof voting machine, a fruit juice extractor, an affordable radio for ordinary homes, and even a small two seater car, though he was denied a licence to manufacture it.

People began calling him the Edison of India.

Nobel laureate C. V. Raman described him as a man in a million.

A boy who walked away from school after the third standard spent the rest of his life teaching a nation how to build.

Follow for stories India deserves to remember.

[theShaunus @theShaunus]

@Hryindex @Fitcomb

[The Haryana Index @Hryindex]

N.T. Rama Rao, the former Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, married Lakshmi Parvathi as his second wife at the age of 70, and this marriage proved fatal for him. His daughter from his first wife was married to Chandrababu Naidu, who could not accept his father-in-law’s second marriage. Chandrababu Naidu rebelled against N.T. Rama Rao, removed him from the Chief Minister’s post, and himself became the Chief Minister. Unable to bear this grief, N.T. Rama Rao passed away just a few months later.

[The Haryana Index @Hryindex]

How real dictatorship looks like — Congress was the ruling party of Haryana and in the Chief Minister’s own city, his son wanted to build his five-star hotel and a Cinema. A highly respectable and charitable businessman named Manohar Lal(Baniya) owned valuable land in the city, where he constructed a temple, a dharamshala, and the samadhis of his ancestors. When the CM’s son sent a message demanding the land and Manohar Lal firmly refused, the police picked up his entire family and subjected them to brutal torture. Orders then came from above to loot everything in the house and temple and blow up the entire complex with explosives. The policemen looted valuables, brought the half-dead Manohar Lal and his family to the spot, and in front of their eyes, destroyed the ancestors’ samadhis, the temple, and the house with explosives, leaving Lord Shiva’s idols and Shivling shattered into pieces and the memorials of his elders scattered everywhere.Yet no one could ever hold the Chief Minister or his son accountable because they were special favourites of the Royal Family of India.

[The Haryana Index @Hryindex]

In Haryana, when the Congress government was in power, the son of an influential Congress leader was appearing for his 12th board exams. Sushila Sangwan was the teacher on duty. When the boy started cheating, the teacher stopped him. The boy tried to threaten and intimidate her, but she did not allow him to cheat. He got up and left the examination hall. That evening, the teacher did not reach home. She did not return the next day either. After three days, the matter reached the media. The then Chief Minister was in Hisar, and when journalists asked him about the teacher’s abduction, he replied, “She must have run away with her lover. What can we do about it?” The very next day, the woman teacher’s body was found in a canal near Hisar. The family was left crying and wailing, but no one could do anything against the powerful.

[Ritika @Im_Ritikaa]

One sided secularism 🤡

[Amrit @AmritHallan]

@will_seaborn The problem with Hindus is that they keep to themselves. They don't build strong communities. They don't lobby. They don't network with the local population. Also, they are easier to bully. I often say that Hindus are bully magnets.

[theShaunus @theShaunus]

@ARanganathan72 @shambhav15

[The Dalit Voice @ambedkariteIND]

In a harrowing incident that shakes the conscience of humanity, revealing that despite India's independence, bonded labor persists in many regions, people were subjected to torture and forced into a life of slavery.

12 Members of Dalit families were held captive for two years in a factory that manufactured paper plates; they were forced to work as bonded laborers and denied proper food, often having to consume animal feed.

They were repeatedly jabbed and assaulted with sharp weapons and beaten with rubber belts used in machinery, dogs were unleashed to ensure they could not escape.

The media does not report this distressing story because the accused belong to an upper caste while the victims are Dalits,

The incident took place in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh.

[Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj @DeepikaBhardwaj]

Taking a moment to thank this cop who heard a grieving family & decided to investigate the angle of murder in what was reported as an accidental death, without thinking why would a 20 year old girl kill her fiance ?

SP Pune Rural.
IPS Sandeep Singh Gill.

If not for him, Siya Goyal and her lover Chetan would have been planning their perfect murder success party and a holiday

Well done @puneruralpolice 👏👏

#SiyaGoyal #KetanAggarwal